Sometimes business opportunity blooms right outside your doorstep, down the local county road and back up the gravel road you’ve driven over a thousand times.  Such is the case with Tumbleweed Tours, a tourism venture in rural southeast Nebraska launched by Victoria Lipovsky and Kelly Kahman, a pair of farm women who aren’t short on vision, energy and enthusiasm for Nebraska country life.

Victoria and Kelly launched Tumbleweed Tours in 2001, offering packaged tours that provide engaging, entertaining, behind-the-scenes day-trip immersions in the local history, culture, foods and people, wrapped in welcoming homespun hospitality.  The day-trip itineraries focus on attractions within a 100-mile radius of Hastings (population 29,000).  Their target market is travel clubs and groups looking for organized day trips, such as regional banks that organize such trips for their customers.  By targeting group tours — typically with busloads of about 45 people — Tumbleweed Tours takes in a guaranteed income, deals with one group contact and has a focused day of tour organization, versus open public tours where attendance would be more sporadic, last-minute and not as predictable.

The attending groups are responsible for coordinating their own motor coach transportation; Victoria and Kelly step on the bus at the group’s arrival at the start of the day and take over from there, shepherding the group through the day’s itinerary.  Appealing to group organizers, typically a community relations or marketing coordinator at a bank, Tumbleweed Tours handles all the details of the tour day, including the itinerary arrangements and serving as hosts and guides.  Tour group organizers make one full payment to Tumbleweed Tours; Victoria and Kelly then coordinate individual payments to the various people and businesses involved.  “In planning the tours, we check out the little details most folks don’t think about, such as bathroom access and logistics on getting the motor coach in and out.”  Their key market so far remains regional banks that offer packaged day trips for their customers. Tumbleweed Tours typically charges $75 per person, which includes two full meals, snacks, pastries and a homespun “red pail” filled with local area gifts and products.

Covering an eclectic, engaging range of topics and experiences, Victoria and Kelly create the itinerary around fun, often quirky themes.  From “Birds, Bandits and Barns” to “The Writer, The Royal and The Rancher’s Daughter,” the itineraries showcase entertaining snippets of the area’s unique heritage.  Tour itineraries can be customized for specific groups, such as a wetland and conservation focus for attendees from the Ducks Unlimited state convention.  Showcasing locally made food items remains a core of Victoria and Kelly’s business mission.  “We take people to the local spots where farmers eat, such as the Horse Shoe Inn in Deweese.  The town’s population of sixty residents just about doubles when our tour bus pulls in,” Victoria says, laughing.  “Tin floors, animal heads on the wall, a mountain of mashed potatoes in a lake of gravy.  These are the unique local experiences we find tourists are looking for,” adds Victoria.

Tumbleweed Tours taps into the growing tourism interest in rural destinations and agri-tourism.  According to ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas), the three components of a successful agri-tourism enterprise include having something for visitors to see, to do and to buy. Relating these components — through themed itineraries as Tumbleweed Tours does — will often determine how successful an enterprise may be.

Currently running about eight tours a year, Victoria and Kelly balance Tumbleweed Tours with raising children — Victoria has three kids and Kelly has two — along with their other responsibilities helping their husbands run family farms, which still provides the bulk of their family income. Their farm operations focus on feedgrains (corn, soybeans, milo, alfalfa ) and a cow-calf herd.  “Right now we market for the shoulder season — those off-peaks travel months in April, May and September — since that is also when our kids are in school.  We’ve found tour groups most interested in tours on Tuesday and Thursday and we plan to slowly expand in the next couple of years as our children get older,” comments Victoria.   Future plans include further developing additional tours tailored for shoppers interested in unique, hand-crafted local items, developing a website and attending and marketing at a major travel show.

Victoria, who just turned 50, credits the forty-something Kelly with the talent for seeing local attractions through fresh eyes and with a strategic marketing hat on, drawing on her MBA skills.  “Both sides of my family had been farming this land for over a hundred years.  At first I didn’t really see our way of life as something unique, but we realized it was to our urban cousins,” explains Victoria.  “Most folks fly over or drive through Nebraska on their way somewhere else.  Our goal is to get them off the interstate and share something that is fresh and new to them, especially the seasoned traveler who has already done the check-list of expected attractions,” explains Victoria.  “Kelly and I make a great team working on Tumbleweed Tours together.  In addition to her fresh perspectives, Kelly comes up with the creative, big picture ideas and I balance things by being a resourceful, detail person,” Victoria adds.

Creative resourcefulness proved to be important in marketing Tumbleweed Tours, enabling the business to launch without the need for a heavy capital investment.  For their first big informational mailing to banks, Victoria and Kelly reached back to their farming roots.  “As farm women, we’re always first to think to use what we have around, which in this case was the pockets of old jeans.  The pants may wear out, but the pockets are still good,” laughs Victoria.  Designing a marketing mailer around these pockets, Victoria and Kelly inserted a sample tour itinerary and business cards into the pocket and mailed it in a clear envelope.  A spectacular response rate of fifty percent of the 20 pieces mailed resulted, far surpassing anything the most sophisticated direct mail company might hope for.  “This was in the wake of the September 11th terrorist tragedy when we knew people were cautious about opening mail and we were advised to send it in a clear envelope,” explains Victoria.

The partners, too, realize the importance of asking for advice, input and support from the start, building Tumbleweed Tours with the guidance of various state and area resources like the Nebraska Division of Travel and Tourism.  Tumbleweed Tours hosted a “familiarization tour” — often called a “fam tour” — back when they were first developing tour itinerary, inviting various people from Nebraska tourism and County Extension to give feedback and opinions on how things could be improved.  Each tour participant also fills out a questionnaire on their travel experiences.

One on-going challenge is to help local people fairly charge for their services.  “Nebraskans, like most rural folks, are naturally very modest. We’ve had to convince them that they have something to share and teach, and that it’s okay to set a fair price for their product or service,” explains Victoria.  Victoria and Kelly have found that shopping is a key interest of travelers and have organized the itineraries to provide various opportunities to purchase locally-made products.  From pickled asparagus to hand-made candles and goat milk soap, income generated through Tumbleweed Tours stays local.